Gender neutrality in languages with grammatical gender is the usage of wording that is balanced in its treatment of the genders in a non-grammatical sense. For example, advocates of gender-neutral language challenge the traditional use of masculine nouns and pronouns (e.g. "man" and "he") when referring to two or more genders or to a person of an unknown gender in most Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic languages. This stance is often inspired by feminist ideas about gender equality. Gender neutrality is also used colloquially when one wishes to be inclusive of people who identify as non-binary genders or as genderless.
Overview Languages with grammatical gender, such as French, German, Greek, and Spanish, present challenges when it comes to creating gender-neutral language. Unlike genderless languages like English, constructing a gender-neutral sentence can be difficult or impossible in these languages due to the use of gendered nouns and pronouns. For example, in Spanish, the masculine gender is used for include all the people with no sex distinction, and the default form of address for a group of students is the masculine plural los estudiantes, regardless of the gender composition of the group. On the other hand, the feminine plural las estudiantes refers to a group consisting only of female students. However, there is no gender-neutral plural form that can be used to refer to mixed-gender groups. Yet, in German, the pronoun is used for all genders as well as for the feminine singular, and the capitalized form is used as a formal, honorific way to address someone.
The challenge of accurately representing all genders in nouns is a common issue faced by languages with grammatical gender, particularly in job titles and professions. One solution has been to create alternative versions of the words, such as using presidenta in Spanish when referring to a female president. At the same time, the newer feminine forms in most such languages are usually derived from the primary masculine term by adding or changing a suffix (such as the German Ingenieurin from Ingenieur, engineer). Citing German as an example, almost all the names for female professionals end in -in, and because of the suffix, none can consist of a single syllable as some masculine job titles do (such as Arzt, doctor). A few times, the female form derives and is employed for both sexes, like in "male nurse" and "male midwife" across several languages. And in a few cases, the male form is derived from the female, as in words for "widow/widower" and "whore/manwhore". However, this solution does not make the noun gender neutral as the noun is still associated with a gender. In many cases, gendered nouns can be replaced by gender-neutral alternatives, such as "docente" instead of "profesor/a" to refer to a teacher, regardless of gender. Gender-neutral nouns can be applied to groups of people to avoid the precedence of one gender. By working within the existing lexicon, modern ideas of gender inclusivity are able to advance without developing entirely new explicit gender-neutral forms.
A further complication is that the creation of distinctly different job titles for men and women means that in writing about hypothetical people of undetermined gender, both words must be mentioned each time, which can become quite cumbersome, or one of the titles must be accepted as genderless which is inherently divisive. In languages where the gender of a noun also affects the formation of other words in a sentence, such as gender-marked adjectives, pronouns, or verbs, this can lead to repetitive or complicated sentences if both terms are used, as the sentence must essentially be repeated twice. The one alternative is the use of gender-neutral nouns that can enclose all people regardless of gender, but this cannot be applied on all cases and on every language.
Germanic languages
In most Germanic languages, nouns have a grammatical gender. The English language is the major exception to this, as most nouns in the English language became genderless between the 11th and 14th centuries.
Dutch
In Dutch, nouns were traditionally masculine, feminine or neuter, but the distinction between masculine and feminine nouns has become blurred as both use the article (as opposed to for neuter words). This has led to the rise of a partial common gender. However, personal pronouns remain gendered (masculine versus feminine ).
There have been different proposals in Dutch to broaden the use of gender-neutral pronouns. Most notably, the pronoun or (direct object form: or , indirect object form: or , possessive form: or ) started gaining traction around 2016. These pronouns are endorsed by the website of the leading Dutch dictionary publisher Van Dale and have been acknowledged by the Dutch Language Union since 2022.
More traditionally, Dutch has employed a variety of means to accommodate cases where the gender of a person is not known. Standard solutions include the use of ('the one'; unstressed) and ('that one'; stressed).
German
The German language uses three grammatical genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter for all nouns, pronouns, and adjectives. The declension system employs suffixes to mark the grammatical gender (m/f/n), number (singular/plural), and grammatical case (nominative, dative, accusative, genitive) of German nouns and adjectives. Nouns referring to people are mostly masculine or feminine, corresponding to their sex. A mixed group of men and women traditionally requires the use of masculine forms; only a group consisting entirely of women uses the feminine plural noun forms. Masculine forms are used for individuals or groups when the sex is not known. Starting in the 1970s, feminists and others have advocated for more gender-neutral usage, creating modified noun forms which have received mixed reactions.
Background
As in other languages, the masculine word is typically unmarked and only the feminine form requires use of a suffix added to the root to mark it. Feminine forms of German nouns are usually created by adding to the root, which corresponds to the masculine form. For example, the root for secretary is the masculine form . Adding the feminine suffix yields ("woman secretary"; plural: : "women secretaries").
Feminist Grammatical forms have been challenged in parts of larger political movements. The word , meaning 'Miss', was banned from use in official correspondence in February 1971.
At the end of the 1970s, groundbreaking work created the field of German feminist linguistics and on the one hand critiqued the inherent structure and usage of German, and on the other men's and women's language behavior, to conclude that German is antagonistic towards women (). For example, the use of the generic masculine form when referring to mixed groups makes women have no representation in the language, mirroring a "man's world", and primes speakers to perceive students, professors, employees, bosses, politicians, every group spoken about — as male. Women were invisible in the patterns of speech and this work goes on to say that language doesn't only mirror reality, it creates it.
Binnen-I
In the 1990s, a form of contraction using a non-standard typographic convention called with capitalization inside the word started to be used (e.g., ; ). In some circles this is especially used to formulate written openings, such as (Dear colleagues). One obstacle to this form is that one cannot audibly distinguish between terms (i.e. sounds the same as ). This is a non-standard solution for how to economically express a position of gender quality in one German word, with an expression that would otherwise require three words, and is not accepted by the Duden, but has achieved a certain level of penetration among some circles in Germany. Opponents of such modification consider the capitalized I in the middle of a word to be a corruption of the language. It is also not clear which gender declension the form is to be used with. Sometimes all adjectival endings are likewise capitalized, such as for "each person" instead of (each grammatically female) or (each grammatically male). This form also tends to be associated with the political left, as it is often used by left-leaning newspapers, notably and the Swiss weekly , and feminists.
Gender gap, gender star and gender colon
Since the 2010s, a form is sometimes used in academic and feminist circles in which an underscore (_), an asterisk (*), or a colon (:) is inserted just before the gender-specific suffix, as in "", "", or "" ("dear student"). These forms, called "gender gap", "gender star", and "gender colon" (, , and in German), are meant to convey an "open space" for all gender identities, whether male, female or genderqueer. In spoken language the underscore or asterisk may be indicated by a glottal stop.
Icelandic Icelandic words for occupations are typically always grammatically masculine, regardless of the gender of the person with the occupation. There were originally grammatically feminine words for traditionally female occupations (e.g. ), but these were replaced with gender-neutral, grammatically masculine words (e.g. ) throughout the 20th and early 21st centuries.
The gender-neutral third-person neopronoun (a blend of the gendered pronouns and ) is in use.
Romance languages
Historical note
Ancient Greek and Classical Latin had generic words for "human"/"humanity in general" or "human being"— () (grammatically masculine or feminine) and (grammatically masculine) respectively—which are the etyma of such modern terms as "anthropology" or . For "male human as opposed to female human", there existed the separate words () and (the etyma of English "androgen" and "virile", respectively). Note Ancient Greek is not a Romance language but the many borrowings we see demonstrates a good contrast with the Latin.
Some modern derivatives of the Latin noun , however, such as French , Italian , Portuguese , and Spanish , have acquired a predominantly male denotation, although they are sometimes still used generically, notably in high registers. For example, French for an anthropology museum exhibiting human culture, is not specifically "male culture". This semantic shift was parallel to the evolution of the word "man" in English. Spanish , Portuguese and French are used to say "human being". In Romanian, however, the cognate retains its original meaning of "any human person", as opposed to the gender-specific words for "man" and "woman" ( and , respectively). In Romansh the word only refers to a male, whereas "human being" is expressed in different ways in the different dialects: or .
Scientific Latin In binomial nomenclature, Latin species names are typically either masculine or feminine, often ending in the -i suffix for masculine names and the -ae suffix for feminine names. In 2021, the species Strumigenys ayersthey was named with the suffix -they (derived from the English singular they pronoun) to create the first gender-neutral Latin binomial name. It was named to honor the non-binary community.
Contemporary Latin The Lupercal group of Latinists, seeing how Latin by Classical grammar rules uses grammatical masculine for mixed groups and for generic titles, have decided as their house style to expand Latin grammar so as to be gender-inclusive: For nouns and adjectives in the 1st and 2nd declension, a 5th declension third variant is created: amicus (masculine), amica (feminine), amices (new neuter) Word pairs with different roots get exchanged with the neuter option: instead of vir (man) or mulier (woman), homo (human) is to be preferred. For the terms "sibling" and "grandparent", as there was no third word, consanguinees (same-bloodied) and proparens (great-parent) are coined The -tor/-trix suffix is given a third option -tres (fifth declension): locutor (a male speaker), locutrix (a female speaker), locutres (a speaker)